1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to video browsers on display devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a user plays a video on a display device, it is desirable to access a particular scene in the video. A navigation aid on the display device enables the user to navigate through a video to the desired scene. For digital video discs (DVDs), the DVD provides scene indices of a stored video to the user in the form of keyframes. For most automatically generated navigation aids, on the other hand, shots are used instead of scenes because it is difficult to automatically detect scenes in a video. Because shots are much shorter than scenes, this leads to a much larger number of keyframes, usually more than ten for each minute of video. In order to access a particular shot, the DVD approach of displaying a few keyframes on a screen, such as a television screen or computer screen, does not scale up well to hundreds of keyframes. The situation is even worse on small devices such as mobile phones that only have room for a few keyframes on each screen.
Further, most interfaces for navigating video rely on either specially designed remotes, for example, a TIVO remote or a mouse. Navigating video on devices with a small display and no mouse, such as a cell phone, is difficult due to limited space to present information about the video and limited options for user input.
What is needed is a better process for automatically enabling navigation of video shots on display devices, and especially on small display devices.